Eight-Ball looked up, allowed his gaze to pause here and there over his enemy's frame; then patted his left trousers pocket. 'It's right here.You big enough to take it?'

'Listen, lampblack. You been tryin' to git fly wid me ev'ry sence las' week, ain't y'? Put d' locks on me wid a crooked deal. Tried to start sump'n in d' barber shop to-day. Tole yo' woman to freeze me at d' dance to-night. Aw right. I'm warnin' y', see? I done warned you twice. I put my mark on yo' two shoes to-day and I put it on yo' coat to-night. D' nex' time I'm gonna put it on yo' black hide. See?'

Eight-Ball sat quite still, looking up at the lowering face.

'I tole y' I'd either take it out yo' pile or off yo' hips. Now put up or git

of the miniature scimitar, whose handle his right hand grasped.

He held the weapon in what pocketknife fighters consider best form three fingers firmly encircling the handle, but the index finger extended along the posterior, dull edge of the blade, tending to direct, brace, and conceal it. A sufficient length of the curved point extended beyond the end of the index finger to permit the infliction of a dangerously deep wound.

Eight-Ball stood ready, leaning a little forward, arms lax, both palms open and empty.

Dirty's scowl concentrated on EightBall's hands, and that he did not move at once was probably due to his astonishment at seeing no weapon in them. Any such astonishment, however, promptly gave way to quick appreciation of an advantage, and he did what a knifer rarely does: he rushed, bringing his blade swiftly across and back in a crisscross sweep before him.

Eight-Ball neither side-stepped nor attempted to block the motion. Either might have been disastrous. Instead, he ducked by suddenly squatting, and, touching the floor with his left hand for balance, kicked suddenly out with his right foot. The sharp crack of his heel against his antagonist's shin must have almost broken it. Certainly he gained time to jump up and seize Dirty's wrist before it could execute a second descending arc.

One less skilled than Eight-Ball would have found this useless. From such a wrist-hold the knife hand is effectively liberated by simply inverting the weapon, which the fingers are still free to manipulate. The blade is thus brought back against its own wrist, and any fingers surrounding that wrist usually let go at once. Eighty had forestalled this contingency by a deft slipping of his grip upward

over the fingers that held the knife handle. The hold that he now fastened upon those fingers was the same that had yanked two slashed balloon tires off their rims some hours before, and it held Dirty's fingers, crushed together around their knife, as securely as a pipe wrench holds a joint.

And now those who had watched this little fellow empty-handed win the advantage over an armed and bigger adversary saw a curious thing occur. Regularly in the ensuing scuffle EightBall's right hand landed open-palmed against Dirty's face landed again and again with a sounding smack; and for every time that it landed presently there appeared a short red line, slowly widening into a crimson wheal.

Before long Dirty, rendered helpless now and losing heart, raised his free hand to his face, and as his fingers passed across it the crimson wheals that they touched all ran together. He looked at the tips of those fingers, saw they were wet and red; his mouth fell open; the hand which Eight-Ball held went limp, the knife fell to the floor; and Dirty Cozzens quailed, as craven now as he'd been evil a moment before.

He began to stammer things, to deprecate, to plead; but Eight-Ball was deaf. The muscles of the latter's left arm seemed about to burst through their sleeve, while the artificial vent in the back of the coat ripped upward to the collar, as with one tremendous twist he brought the other man to his knees.

In that mad moment of triumph no one may say what disproportionate stroke of vengeance might not have

brought on real tragedy. But with that strange and terrible open palm raised, a voice halted Eight-Ball's final blow:

'Mercy-Lawd, have mercy!'

Tessie Smith's voice, wailing out of an extremity of despair:

'Letter come and tole me

They'd put my lovin' man in jail.'

The entire engagement had occupied only the few moments during which the phonograph automatically prepared itself to repeat. Now the words came as warning and plea:

'Mercy Lawd, have mercy!'

Eight-Ball released Dirty Cozzens, stepped back, picked up a crumpled paper napkin from the table where Effie still sat.

'Wipe y' face with this. Go on 'round to the hospital.' He urged Dirty, whimpering, out of the side door.

Then he turned back toward Effie, stood over the table a moment, returned her rather proud smile. Two of the men who had looked on came up. Said one:

'Buddy, show me that trick, will you?'

Eight-Ball extended his right hand, palm downward, and spread the fingers wide open. Freed from its vise-like hiding place between firmly adjacent fingers, something fell upon the porcelain table top. It fell with a bright flash and a little clinking sound not unlike a quick laugh of surprisethe safety-razor blade which Effie had borrowed that afternoon from Pop Overton.

FIFTEEN cases for the People's Court have piled up in the back villages of Khvalynsk Volost. That means a hundred peasants, each making a twentyor thirty-verst journey down from the hills to Khvalynsk.

'Instead of coming to you, we are asking the Court to come to us.' This is the request that Red-beard Lopukhov from Pine Tar Village delivers to Judge Khonin.

officially made to the tax appraiser. Hail beat down the crops, and claims were put in for twelve hundred dessiatines damaged.

A stubborn village. Sixty thousand poods was the grain requisition levied on it in 1919. The village heads announced, 'Thirty thousand is all that we will give.' Commissars came, arrested the village heads, sent them off to Khvalynsk. A new assembly was

'If you will come, we will furnish horses, food, lodging,' says the emissary. 'Agreed,' replies the Judge.

A bitter cold December day when the yemshik drew up before our doors. I fitted myself into the prosecutor's felt boots (valenki), the prosecutor into the Judge's; the Judge confiscated his boy's. Loading ourselves into a twig basket resembling a bathtub on runners, we climbed up the gully road. A long drive buffeting the wind on the high plateau above the Volga, and at last Pine Tar Village and into a big wall-on-wall fight proceeding in honor of the first fall of snow.

Pine Tar is a big village-six hundred and fifty houses, and a centre for many near-by hamlets.

A well-to-do village. Drawing a double income by adding to its grain fields great onion beds irrigated by many springs.

A cunning village. 'Six hundred dessiatines sowed' were the returns

reply: Thirty thousand we will give, and not one pood more.' They in turn were arrested and a Red division billeted in the village. The peasants hid their grain in the earth, sold it to Tatars in the night, carried it off in boots and aprons, distilled it into samogon; anything but give it up to the threatening commissars, who, after a year's effort, gathered in but fifteen thousand poods

half what the village agreed to give. An Old Believers' village. Founded by the Sharpshooters (Streltzi) exiled thither after the revolt against Peter the Great, and enduring century-long persecution from the Orthodox State Church. Their bells were silenced; even the repairing of their prayer house was forbidden; and by special order of the Tsar sentinels were placed at the doors to bar all entrance.

Now the bells swing free, and their soft chiming at evening dusk led me to the prayer house.

Opening the door, I stepped into the Middle Ages - into a big-bearded,

black-caftaned peasant mass, white framed by long rows of platok-headed women. In the centre an enormous book was held aloft in many upstretched arms, the strange Slavonic script lit by a gigantic green candle, while out of the painted pages forty peasants chanted the ancient liturgy, calling, with incredible rapidity, 'God's mercy on us!' surely not less than a thousand times. Even the Judge, who holds a Tolstoyan animus against the Church, but whom I induced to look in, admitted it was weirdly impressive.

Jeweled ikons, white incense clouds, golden-clad priests swaying with the censers, worshipers in deep prostrations to the floor, endless signing of the cross in unison, hundreds of candle flames pin-pricking the dark, and sombre, big-eyed saints gazing down from their silver frames. I might have succumbed to the mesmerism of the ceremony were it not for profane thoughts about the combustibility of those long beards waving so freely among the candles. Were virgin beards somehow fireproof? Or do they sometimes burn up? For Old Believers this would be a twofold tragedy: the loss of decoration in this world and of a passport into the next.

With these prophet-bearded men in great flowing coats the village looks as though it had stepped out of the Old Testament. And the resemblance is not merely superficial.

II

It was with the old patriarchal family, the Agaphonovs, that the Court was lodged. Four generations inhabiting two rooms, and on top of them came we six in number. Samovar and soup were set up by babushka, and out of the Judge's sausage roll, the prosecutor's apples, and the defender's meat, we made a communal feast. After the roster of the morrow's cases,

crimes of the village were called for. The Soviet jurists were young, but they already had a professional taste for crime, like doctors for disease. All that evening we heard the crimes of Pine Tar Village, past, present, and prospective.

They began with the story of what

had happened at this had happened at this very table around which we sat. Here, one saint's day, sat two big muzhiks, Vassily Nazarovich and Yegor Luda, celebrating their lifelong friendship in demijohns of vodka. They sang the old songs together, kissed, embraced, calling each other 'Little red sun,' 'Blue dove,' 'Little white dove' all the Russian terms of endearment. But all so inadequate to the exaltation of their feelings! Nothing left but that peculiar means by which the peasant expresses the extremes of his affection the fists. 'For love's sake, Vassily,' said Yegor, 'let's go out and fight!'